Michael Collins (1996)
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
MICHAEL COLLINS --------------- Grade: B // Worth a Matinee
(Warner Bros.)
Director: Neil Jordan. Screenplay: Neil Jordan. Director of Photography: Chris Menges. Producer: Stephen Woolley. Starring: Liam Neeson, Alan Rickman, Aidan Quinn, Julia Roberts, Stephen Rea.
MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity) Running Time: 135 minutes.
MICHAEL COLLINS is a perfect project for a collaboration between Neil Jordan and Liam Neeson, two artists whose projects tend to inspire background articles. Jordan had everyone talking about _not_ talking about his 1992 sleeper hit THE CRYING GAME, then inspired controversy when he cast Tom Cruise as the amoral immortal Lestat in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE; Neeson has stepped into the shoes of enigmatic historical figures (SCHINDLER'S LIST) and national heroes (ROB ROY). They are in familiar territory then with MICHAEL COLLINS, which has drawn the expected fire for glorifying an ostensible terrorist and for playing fast and loose with history. Unfortunately, that controversy is almost more compelling than the film itself, which proves that hero worship and drama can make uncomfortable companions.
Neeson plays the title role of Michael Collins, who is among the many Irish nationalists arrested in the wake of the failed 1916 Easter uprising against the imperial British rule. After two years in prison, Collins emerges convinced that conventional warfare has no chance of defeating the British. The alternative is a guerrilla campaign of bombings and assassinations of British government operatives, and that is exactly what Collins and his friend Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn) undertake. Though violent and destructive, the program eventually brings the British to the bargaining table, but the result could be even more violent and destructive. A compromise agreement which divides the nation physically also divides the nation politically, as Irish Republic president Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman) leads opposition to the agreement against Collins and a government which has exchanged an external battle for an internal one.
Neil Jordan (who also wrote the screenplay) is clearly going out of his way to paint Collins as an extraordinary figure in Irish history, as well as to rationalize his extremism. "I hate them for making hate necessary" Collins says in one of several scenes where Jordan makes his soul-searching known to us, and it is only because Liam Neeson can sell such a line that it doesn't inspire eye-rolling. Neeson has exactly the charisma and physical presence to be convincing as a nigh-mythical figure known as "The Big Fella," but he also conveys a moral uncertainty. He plays Collins with intelligence, conviction and sadness, and it is more thanks to Neeson than it is to Jordan that Collins emerges as an intriguing character, a man of action forced to make an uneasy transition to man of peace.
MICHAEL COLLINS is usually a solid piece of drama when it focuses on the political, with Alan Rickman providing a complex counterpart to Collins as the more politically calculating De Valera. Jordan sometimes over-reaches in his portrayal of the British as faceless villains, notably in a scene where an armored car opens fire on the crowd at a rugby match, but generally he is able to maintain a tense adversarial triangle of Collins, De Valera and the British. His other triangle, however, is a perplexing mistake, and highlights how awkward MICHAEL COLLINS becomes whenever Jordan tries to show us Collins' softer side. There is a lovely lass named Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts, improving on her MARY REILLY brogue) who comes between Collins and Harry Boland, and perhaps the schism is intended to foreshadow the civil strife to come. Still, there is little heat between Neeson and Roberts, and the relationship is not developed in any appreciable way. When Jordan juxtaposes a series of political murders with an idyllic bedroom scene between Collins and Kitty a la the baptism sequence in THE GODFATHER, the scenes do not complement one another; every cut back to the budding romance is simply a distraction.
Even though MICHAEL COLLINS manages to avoid ever using two of the most critical words in the Irish conflict -- "Catholic" and "Protestant" -- it still provides a strong overview of the pivotal years when the Irish rebels realized that fighting dirty was the only option left to them. it is a good looking film with several fine performances (including Neil Jordan regular Stephen Rea as an informant for Collins inside the British government), but I don't think it ever pretends to be an objective history. MICHAEL COLLINS is meant to be a monument to an important figure in Irish lore, and it does a fine job of making him a monument. It is when it tries to make him a man that it inspires the only artistic controversy it deserves.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Gael forces: 7.
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